Ready, Fire, Aim
From now on, we will talk a lot about the keys to making a great and workable plan. But remember, a plan can only take us so far. It does not matter how much information we have or how prepared we are — if we never take action, we will never get anywhere. We cannot wait until our plan is perfect to start taking action. This would be like planning a trip to Disney World but not leaving until you knew there would be no red lights along the way. Honestly, we wouldn’t make it to the grocery store with that strategy.
When our dreams are so cherished, it can be hard to take any risks with them. As long as our dreams are safe in our heads, they can’t be hurt, and we can’t be hurt trying to achieve them. It is always a risk and a bet when we decide to chase our dreams. Once we put our dreams out into the world, we must face the reality of achieving them. We have to acknowledge how much work it will take to achieve them. We have to reckon with the fact that chasing our dreams will require sacrifices. And it will require the people we love to make sacrifices as well. As military spouses, we are already very familiar with this dynamic. We have sacrificed many times so our spouses can chase their dreams of military service. Whether they dream of making a difference, achieving glory or anything else, life in the military is a dream (I know, a ridiculous statement).
We know how much chasing that dream demands sacrifices, and our dreams will be no different. Sure, we didn’t sign a contract that would put us in a military prison if we violated it. But we do make a commitment to our dreams. By taking the time to discover our dreams, we make them real in our lives. And, once they become real to us, it is tough to turn our back on them. We don’t want anything to happen to our dreams, but something has to happen in order for us to achieve them.
Here’s another way to look at it. I can’t watch military movies anymore, not since my husband and I got married. I used to love war movies and never cared how accurate they were. I just enjoyed watching people utterly dedicated to pursuing their dreams. But once my husband and I got married, I just couldn’t do it anymore. The movies would give me anxiety thinking about my husband in those situations regardless of the fact that his job would never put him in that position, especially since the majority of what I watched was WWII based. I dreamed of my husband and could not handle watching or thinking about situations that would endanger him. I didn’t need to add anything else for me to worry about when my husband did go out to serve.
We’ll talk about overcoming the fear associated with pursuing our dreams on another day. Today, I want to introduce the principle of ready, fire, aim. I know we’ve all heard the phrase as ready, aim, fire, but I want to switch things up. I don’t want us to get so caught up aiming that we never actually fire. The planning phase is fun. The dreaming phase is fun. The taking action phase is definitely less fun. And getting stuck in the planning and dreaming phase is so easy.
I have known that I wanted to write a book since mid-2019. I didn’t start writing until the end of 2020 because I spent so long researching how to write a book. This was despite the fact that the biggest piece of writing advice out there is to start writing and figure it out later. And once I had written the book, it was 2021 before I made any effort to reach out to publishers. I knew that in order to really have a shot at getting published, I would need a platform that would involve social media and website development. And it wasn’t until January of 2023 that I actually started working on this project.
I spent a lot of time planning each aspect of this dream. I spent a lot of time planning blog posts before launching (a plan which I have totally ignored). I spent a lot of time just thinking about what this dream meant to me and how I could achieve it. But taking action is difficult. This is why we ready ourselves by doing research and preparing a plan. But once we hit about 75% good to go on our plan, we fire it into action. This can mean making an investment, reaching out to a contact, knocking down a wall in your house or anything else. Anything can be a dream which means every dream has a different first step.
Once we have fired, we can then take a step back, look up and aim. Then we get our aim about 75% right again and repeat the process. Eventually, that 75% gets us as close to 100% as we can ever hope for. But this process allows us to take action. It gets us in the game, and it is only once we make mistakes that we can correct them. Ignorance on fire will always be more powerful than knowledge on ice.
I know how tempting it is to wait until you have all of the information. I know how easy it is to sit quietly with your dream, never allowing it the chance to become real. I know the fear that can come from never wanting to fail, not wanting to disappoint anyone and never wanting to risk finding out that maybe we weren’t as capable as we thought. But our spouses leave all the time on the whim of the military. Thankfully, it was canceled, but my husband was set to deploy a few weeks ago to an undetermined location for an indefinite amount of time, and we weren’t even sure when he would be leaving. But had the Air Force called him in, he would have gone, knowing very little, because this is his dream. If our spouses are bold enough to chase their dreams, knowing very little about what that may entail, then we should practice the same bravery and begin to pursue our dreams. Let’s ready, fire and aim!
